FREE WITH THE FIRST VIEWING STREEEN THE SHORT FILM OF “RATA NECE BITI” Notes for an Afghan Film (Daniele Gaglianone, 22, 2009, Italy)
Following opposite paths, the ideological aftermath of the war leads to the outskirts, to the Lukavica neighborhood, to a bar called Sing Sing and then to the home of Saša, a young history professor entrenched with "his" followers in defense of the Serbian nationalist ideal.
Aziz, on the other hand, is a former soldier of the Bosnian Army, employed in the defense of Srebrenica and fortunately escaped the massacre.
Now she lives in Ilidža, a suburb of the capital, but hers is a journey back to the place where her mother's village once stood, on the Drina, the river that separates Bosnia from Serbia, a river that is also a mother, but irremediably stained with blood.
Another village wiped out by the war and now inhabited and rebuilt again: Sućeska, in the mountains above Srebrenica.
Mohamed is the šumar, the forester.
He has returned to grazing his flock, to tending the forest and cutting wood, every day he walks through the same woods through which he fled during the fall of Srebrenica.
On July 11, 1995, Serbian nationalists led by Mladic entered the city, thousands of people sought refuge at the Dutch UN base, and boys over twelve were separated from women and systematically murdered in the following days.
Here Hajra saw her husband for the last time, as the Serbs dragged him away.
His remains were found in a mass grave near Zvornik.
She hasn't heard anything more about her son Nino, whom Hajra had said goodbye to a few hours earlier as she headed into the woods.
Now the woman lives alone in the house in Srebrenica, where she wanted to return.
The ICMP (International Commission on Missing Persons) has been established in Tuzla, and its staff is working to recover the remains still piled up in mass graves or scattered in the woods, to recompose the bodies, identify them through DNA testing, and finally return them to their families.
It's a difficult and painful process, but probably necessary for time to begin flowing again.
